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“ It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. ”

-- Steve Jobs, 1998

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Isobel Baxter

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Publications by Isobel Baxter (bibliography)

1993

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Jones, Robert Alun, Edgerton, E., Baxter, Isobel, Naven, L. M., Ritchie, Jan, Bell, G. and Murray, K. (1993): Where Should a Public Access Health Information System be Sited?. In Interacting with Computers, 5 (4) pp. 413-421.

“The use of a touch-screen public access health information system was evaluated by monitoring system usage, by interviews with an opportunistic sample of 90 users and by other surveys. To get the largest number of users, such a system needs to be sited in a highly visible setting where there are lots of people passing. For most people, privacy does not appear to be a problem. However, some groups may require more privacy and when siting in 'quieter' places, such as a library this may be more important than in busier anonymous places, or in places where health is a 'natural' topic of interest. Waiting rooms may not be the best sites.”

1991

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Baxter, Isobel and Oatley, Keith (1991): Measuring the Learnability of Spreadsheets in Inexperienced Users and Those with Previous Spreadsheet Experience. In Behaviour and Information Technology, 10 (6) pp. 475-490.

“The issues of 'usability' and 'learnability' are assuming an increasingly important role for both the designers of software and their prospective customers. Objective measures of the interaction between system and user are important for the development of software that is both easy to learn and pleasurable to use. In this study, we apply a set of five measures to evaluate users' interactions with spreadsheet software, and to compare two spreadsheet packages. We tested 16 people with no previous experience of spreadsheets and 16 with experience of spreadsheets generally though not of the spreadsheet we gave them. Half were allocated to learn Excel and half to learn Wingz, running on Apple Macintosh computers. A standard task was constructed to assess understanding of the basic concepts involved in the use of spreadsheets. Users' previous experience of spreadsheet use was the most salient factor in the scores achieved on the task. The brand of spreadsheet had no significant effect on task performance. Implications for designers of software and users of spreadsheet packages are discussed.”

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O'Donnell, Patrick J., Scobie, Geoff and Baxter, Isobel (1991): The Use of Focus Groups as an Evaluation Technique in HCI. In: Diaper, Dan and Hammond, Nick (eds.) Proceedings of the Sixth Conference of the British Computer Society Human Computer Interaction Specialist Group - People and Computers VI August 20-23, 1991, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK. pp. 211-224.

“This study examines the focus group as an evaluation technique. Many of the methods used for user requirements capture and for evaluation of usability suffer from being individual based. This leads to serious concerns over the validity of techniques. It is noticeable that in the plethora of definitions of usability and in the variety of techniques (both 'objective' and subjective) pressed on the designer for employment during user requirements capture, prototype evaluation and field evaluation, the issues of reliability and validity are not often in focus. This paper addresses the question of construct validity as it affects specifically the focus group in HCI. A central heating control interface from Honeywell Control Systems was subjected to prototyped based evaluation using a range of different techniques including a focus group. 20 subjects operated a predesignated task scenario on an interface and had their performance videotaped. Indexes of performance were calculated, time for sub task completion and error rate. Subjective assessments by subjects of the performance were also taken as were a range of other measures. Subjects then took part in a moderated focus group. The discussion was content analysed and measures of satisfaction/dissatisfaction constructed. Measures derived from the task scenario were correlated with the focus group based measures. The scenario based measures predicted the focus group indexes especially the number of criticisms uttered. However some dimensions of subject evaluation were not predicted by the scenario measures. This implies that the construct validity of the focus group does not overlap completely with that of other evaluation techniques.”

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